Goonies never say die

Flippin amazing, right? Although I’ve seen these stairs featured on a ton of websites, I could not find a legitimate source. Frustrating. Most of the features link Pinterest as the source. Of course, while this amazing picture was my inspiration, it is also quite a bit above my skill level, so I dumbed it down put my own spin on it.

Now the world is doing everything it can to keep me from finishing this project and posting it. First it was finding suitable words to paint. That took about 6 months. Next I decided to use paint markers instead of paint/paintbrush for better control. The day the markers arrived in the mail, we took my mom to the ER and I spent most of the next week and a half at the hospital with her. Of course, when we finally came home, I was very much behind on just about everything at home so I took an hour here and there to put some elbow grease into it. And tonight, when I planned to do the post, I instead got bogged down meticulously gathering up my tax documents.

But I cannot be delayed any longer. Here is the before:

If you have never been to our house, our setup is a little unique. You actually walk in on the second floor, which is the main floor. Then you can go downstairs to the man cave, craft room/bedroom, and laundry room. Because of this setup, I felt it was okay to get a little whimsical on the stairs–because you can only see them from the mancave. There’s not much I hate more in the world than carpeted stairs. They pick up so much dirt and are impossible to clean. This carpet actually came up a year ago. That’s how long I’ve been eyeing those red stairs.

The wood up under there was pretty banged up and pieced together, so good thing I wanted to paint.

They actually stayed bare for a couple of months, sadly. Don’t worry, we did leave the handrail up until we were ready to paint.

Originally, the mancave was a light blue. We wanted something warmer, so we went with a burnt orange, but we didn’t want the orange to continue all the way up the stairs onto the wall. So we taped off a line at the bottom of the stairs where the orange would end and we painted the remaining light blue wall a neutral white. Here is my handsome being his usual weird self while puttying and sanding the wall. We later covered the line that separated the two colors with some molding.

Here are the stairs all painted and purty (the handrail got painted black too). We used porch and floor paint, but it definitely is not mean to stand up to the wear and tear of stairs, so it definitely needs to be sealed with a protective coat.

Don’t mind the unfinished gallery wall.

And drum roll please…..here’s how it looks now that I’ve pinterized it:

We don’t take ourselves too seriously around here, so it’s a quote from the movie Hook, a movie that Day loves. Sidenote: We have an age old debate going on over here about which movie is better, Hook or The Goonies. Feel free to weigh in, but I know that Goonies never say die.

The paint marker wasn’t paint-like as I thought it would be, so it actually looks more like chalk, which is okay with me. Kind of a vintage-y feel. In hindsight, since there weren’t enough words to cover each step, I wish I would have started one step lower. But hey, I’m not about to redo it any time soon, and I still like it a whole lot.

Love this…and I think (if I can convince my hubby to let me) that I would do my stairs like this, only I would use black chalk paint on the front (w/o sealing it) so I could change out the message…I could even leave messages for the kiddos and for the hubby (but don’t tell him, because then he “wouldn’t” let me paint the stairs).
And GOONIES…it’s always going to be Goonies.